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The Threepenny Festival Association, Virtual Migrants, Rainbow Collective, Voices That Shake!, with the London Mining Network and War On Want created an artist led intervention in the protest outside the BHP-Billiton Annual General Meeting in London on October 19th. A map representing villages displaced by the Cerrejón open cast mine was created and rolled out in front of the entrance to the conference hall, leaving shareholders with the choice of confronting or dodging their complicity. The film was made alongside this process, documenting the struggle of the WaYúu people, and calling for action.

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On 12th February 2015, Maria Balshaw was interviewed By Radio 4, she talked about the very diverse communities in Moss Side on their doorstep and stated “We want to give something back to Moss Side”.

This was in answer to the question about the Whitworth Art Gallery being about catering for all walks of life. She is now to be promoted to the top job of director of the Tate. We wonder what people from Moss Side think about her publicly broadcasted statement?

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CONTINENTCHOPCHOP
austerity, refugees and climate destruction: a story told through music, poetry, transmedia and spoken word

With performances currently touring from October-December 2015 in Manchester, London, Liverpool, Huddersfield, Leeds and Leicester. Tour dates and tickets

Climate justice stories from across the world weaved together via Afrobeat influences, experimental electronics, English Folk and deconstructed imperial anthems.

Continent Chop Chop asks: What are the connections between climate change and poverty? How does the wider climate of austerity and scapegoating of migrants connect with climate change? And why should anyone care when they don’t have enough to eat?

Featuring commissioned recordings and footage from Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigeria-based leading environmental activist, and from Zena Edwards, a London-based performance poet, writer and musician.

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NNIMMO BASSEY is an award-winning African climate activist and poet: we want to make a film about his work and how it connects with austerity, refugees and our wider realities. Please spread the word about our crowdfunding campaign, or donate yourself if you can:

This film will be more than a film about a strong and critically important activist – which is worthwhile in itself. It will also connect Nnimmo’s work with immediate headline issues concerning many of us – austerity and refugees – and so will join some of the dots which many environmental films do not.[Read more…]

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We’ve launched a crowdfunder so that we can work with poet, author, activist Nnimmo Bassey. To support us click on the CCC logo on the right to go to Indiegogo.
For more information about the project click on the Continent Chop Chop menu.

A new transmedia performance by Virtual Migrants, touring from November 2015. It focuses on climate destruction and how it is linked to global austerity policies and refugees. It currently includes only a short voice-over from Nnimmo Bassey as a part of the story. We’ve launched a crowdfunder for this climate justice film project on Indiegogo. The new film created in collaboration with Nnimmo Bassey will become a centre-piece of the performance.

Poster Film Collective cultural consciousness in the 80s

Whose World Is The World by Poster Film Collective cultural consciousness in the 80s. Any parallels now? http://poster-collective.org.uk/whoseworld/index.php
These posters were often in the youth clubs and community centres that we worked in, running creative, campaigning and discussion activities focused on anti-racist and suppressed historical ideas and knowledge. They gave a continuity in the environment that the people who used the building could continue to reflect on after the activities and workshops, in an immediate and visual way without too much text clutter. I really think we need this kind of stuff again in our physical environment, maybe the digital world makes us forget these possibilities?

Migrant crisis: tackle the cause and not the symptom?

The Chance Or Choice report suggests long term answer lies in [Read more…]

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The 2-screen installation ‘Buy This (v3)’ created with support from Virtual Migrants as part of their Centre Cannot Hold ongoing exploration of climate imperialism, was re-formatted as a single screen artists’ video and toured Canada as part of the Monitor 9 programme by SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) in Toronto. We now have this video installation art archived by Vtape, a non-profit distribution and resource centre in Toronto. Vtape is the leading distributor for video art in Canada, established in 1980. They represent a collection of over 5000 titles, accessible to artists, curators and educators.

The original ‘Buy This (v1) installation was more complex and interactive, exhibited at The Arnolfini in Bristol (2009) as a part of the ‘C Words’ exhibition about climate justice. This later non-interactive video-based version (v3) was premiered at the first Platforma Festival in December 2011 as a proper 2-screen installation followed by Manchester’s local Chorlton Arts Festival in 2012, and then in 2013 toured a few venues in Canada courtesy of South Asian Visual Arts Centre (Toronto) as part of Monitor 9 with the two screens compiled into a single screen for ease of exhibition, and then also at No.W.Here Gallery in London.

Although this work has been screened as a single video stream, it is best viewed using two separate projectors as an installation because the intention is that the two screens loop at different rates so that the imagery juxtaposition continually changes. Here is the original description of the work:

Buy This (v3)video installation

by artist Kooj (Kuljit) Chuhan, 2012, a part of an ongoing exploration by Virtual Migrants artists’ group

Year of completion: 2012Country of production: UKRunning time: 6 mins 20 secs as a continual loop

Refugees and ‘third-world’ migrants bring with them intimate and undervalued knowledge about climate change. ‘Buy This’ juxtaposes such voices on one screen against another, over-saturated with colliding imagery of wars, colonial struggles, environmental upheaval and UK racism, overlaid with scrolling news messages.

An exploration of how environmental change is integral to the economic and political forces bringing about human displacement and racial inequality, and a continuation of the “Centre Cannot Hold” project discussing climate imperialism and the violent commodification of humans and the environment.

Increasing numbers of people in the UK are sceptical of man-made climate change, outnumbering those who accept climate change as man-made. Many local members of refugee communities have recent personal experiences and observations from their originating countries which are able to testify to environmental change. By enabling local refugees to express first-hand observations from countries they have recently migrated from, collaborating with scientists and social scientists to discuss their data, local people can intimately appreciate changing conditions in other countries. At the same time, it is an opportunity to raise discussion in the UK about the global connections between race and climate, and also how they may impact on issues such as asylum in Europe and the West.

The media-saturated culture which we in the western world inhabit is a facet of a wider approach to (over-) consumption which has become the norm, and which is fundamental to ideas of maximising economic growth with the resultant process of murdering the planet’s resources and bringing about climate devastation. More than this, the arts, media and cultural sectors is largely complicit in nurturing false illusions and political amnesia, this ‘soft’ consumption of particular cultural and aesthetic meanings actually forms our ways of thinking, seals our disconnections, and this video work taunts the viewer to Buy This.